Iraqi forces poised for final Tikrit assault

Iraqi commanders were plotting a strategy for flushing out the few remaining Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from central Tikrit, a city one commander said on March 14 would be liberated within three days.

Iraqi commanders were plotting a strategy for flushing out the few remaining ISIL from central Tikrit, a city one commander said Saturday would be liberated within three days.
      
The massively outnumbered ISIL fighters are completely boxed in but protected by snipers and thousands of bombs they planted across the city.
      
That has slowed the progress of the broad alliance of forces battling ISIL, which is keen to minimise casualties on the way to what would be the biggest victory yet against the jihadists.
      
Karim al-Nuri, a top leader of the Badr militia and spokesman of the volunteer Popular Mobilisation units, said it would take no more than "72 hours" to liberate Tikrit from ISIL, which seized it last summer.
      
The last defenders are holed up in the city centre and "surrounded from all sides", Nuri said.
      
Speaking to AFP from the outskirts of Tikrit, near the village of Awja, he said "their number is now 60 to 70".
      
An lieutenant colonel in the army's elite counter-terrorism forces was more conservative about the battle's evolution, saying "battles in cities are difficult for all armies".
                      
AFP reporters in a northern neighbourhood of Tikrit saw dozens of craters on a single street, caused by the explosion of bombs concealed underneath.
      
On a roof, a government marksman wearing a white headscarf and who gave his name as Haj Abu Maryam said that by noon, he had already killed two enemy snipers.
      
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